Actually, I woke up this morning with my mind too much concentrated on itself and on the aches and pains of too much bed rest, and called my friend and chiropractor to have a good session, which I will do as soon as another friend gets here to drive me. The benefits of enforced rest are that I am writing poetry again, and have been studying hard for my ministerial coursework.

I need to heal fully as I will be going to Colombia (Medellín and possibly Bogotá) in March as the “official” interpreter for the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests, for whom I interpreted last November at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning. For the last several years I have had very emotional outbursts related to faith and to the revolutionary Jesus, whom I have followed since a retreat at the age of 15 in the Dominican Republic (very definitely a liberation theology retreat, although I don’t remember ever hearing that phrase until much later in my adult life) broke down all my barriers forever. Most of the work that I have done in my life goes back to those three days and nights in the mountains of beautiful Santo Domingo, when I studied, meditated in silence, prayed, and wept. And yes, I sang as I always do, in joy and in grief, and I then spent years traveling through the earthly miasma that passes for religion in our times, trying to join the thoughts to the action.

In 2011 I attended SOAW’s legislative session in DC, and one of the things that happened was that I was arrested with Jim Forsyth after a die-in against torture in front of the White House, and as he was being handcuffed he turned and asked me to marry him… and Jim was not a believer as such, but he was full of spirit and was kindness and selflessness personified. He was used to working with the religious left, and there are plenty of us who have not bought into the fundamentalist propaganda about “accepted” religion, including another one of my early heroes, Dorothy Day.

We were also there to support Father Roy Bourgeois’ response to the Vatican’s demand that he retract his statements supporting the ordination of women priests, and we stood outside in front of the Vatican Embassy in the rain, as you can see from the picture here.

I will miss, for the first time since his birth, my grandson Dax’s birthday; Jim and I saw him minutes after he came out of my daughter’s womb, and Jim, who loved Christmas because it was the celebration of a child’s birth, had tears in his eyes. He would cry when he read stories about human cruelty, and then he would take us picketing or protesting. How I miss you, my love…